Tattoos are created by injecting ink into the skin. Today, in most cases, the injection of the ink is done by one or more needles which are attached to a device. Such a device will be called hereinafter a skin puncturing device. Preferably, but not limitatively, the skin puncturing device is a hand-held device. The skin puncturing device moves the needle along the longitudinal axis of the needle, similar to the movement of a needle in a sewing machine. Usually the skin puncturing device moves the needle at a rate of several vibrations per minute (e.g., the needles may puncture the skin at the rate of 50 to 3,000 times per minute). Prior to the penetration of the needle into the skin, the needle is dipped in a suitable solution which contains pigment (e.g., ink) and then this solution is sucked up through a suitable tube system of the skin puncturing device. Alternatively, the solution may be provided to the needle through a capsule suitable to be connected to the skin puncturing device. After obtaining the solution the skin puncturing device is used to puncture the top layer of the skin and to drive insoluble, micrometer-sized particles of ink into the dermal layer of skin (i.e., dermis), preferably, about one millimeter deep. As a result, the ink is not located in the epidermis, but it intermingles with cells in the dermis. Since the cells of the dermis are relatively fixed the tattoo's ink remains at the dermis, thereby tattooing the skin.
For a variety of reasons, there are people who wish to remove a tattoo from their skin. However, because tattoos are intermingled with cells in the dermis, removing them is not an easy task. In the prior art, several methods for removing tattoos exist, which methods are usually invasive, some of them even requiring surgery, and may also be painful. Such known methods are:                Dermabrasion, wherein skin is “sanded” (i.e., abraded) to remove the surface which contains the tattoo;        Cryosurgery, wherein the area where the tattoo is located is frozen prior to its removal; and        Excision, wherein the dermatologic surgeon removes the tattoo with a scalpel and closes the wound with stitches (In some cases involving large tattoos, a skin graft from another part of the body may be necessary).        
However, such tattoo removal methods are painful, and may also create scars.
Other methods for tattoo removal use lasers. Lasers offer a bloodless alternative to the abovementioned methods and may also have fewer side effects. Each removal procedure is done or in a single or in a series of treatments. Patients may or may not require topical or local anesthesia. Lasers remove tattoos by producing short pulses of intense light that pass through the top layers of the skin, to be selectively absorbed by the tattoo pigment. This laser energy causes the tattoo pigment to fragment into smaller particles that are then removed by the body's immune system. However, there is still a possibility that using a laser may cause scarring. Furthermore, it is difficult to remove with the lasers pigments having colors such as yellow and green. Such colors selectively absorb laser light and can only be treated by selected lasers based on the pigment color. Moreover, there are side effects of laser procedures which may cause, for instance, hyperpigmentation, or an abundance of color in the skin at the treatment site, and hypopigmentation, where the treated area lacks normal skin color.
In addition, having a tattoo removed in each of the above methods is a long and expensive procedure.
All the methods described above have not yet provided satisfactory solutions to the problem of removing a pigmented section of skin in a simple way.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method for removing a pigmented section of skin, which overcomes the drawbacks of the prior art.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method for removing a pigmented section of skin which is relatively inexpensive.
Other objects and advantages of the invention will become apparent as the description proceeds.